Smoke and Stargazing
by ChronicCombustion
Summary: You wonder briefly if he's meant to lead you in a better direction. Or maybe just off to a different shore. AU. Oneshot. AkuDem pre-relationship. Themes of dissociation. Mild language. 2nd Person Demyx's POV.


I... don't even know what this is supposed to be. I was feeling nostalgic and dissociated and a little trapped, so AkuDem became my outlet. Plus my bestie asked for shippy things. (I guess this counts as pre-relationship?)

Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts, nor any of the characters/locations therein.

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He's 90's grunge rock trash with the cherry-bloom light up end of a cigarette dangling out from between his teeth as he looks at you over the campfire. You can't say for sure if you've ever actually spoken to him before but you're sure you've seen him wandering about the boardwalk a few times in the sticky summer-evening air. He's always in something torn and faded-black, like he just walked straight out of a stylized music video and you can feel your heart skip a beat with how he makes the nostalgia for your teenaged years come flooding back. He looks like what you wish your high school time was like and before you can blink he's moved around the campfire to plunk down at your side, kicking up sand as he does.

"Hey," he says, voice like smoke and too many late nights full of music with over-driven guitar. "You're back."

You suppose you are. It's been every night for a week, though not all of them were at this same location. You started off a little further down the beach with a few of your friends from home, but they've already decided they wanted to go beach-hopping so they've long since moved on to the next town and left you here on your own. You're a little mad, yeah, because you wanted to stay and enjoy the place some more rather than skip around from place to place, but in the end you did kind of get what you wanted despite them ditching you. It isn't like you don't have a car of your own, anyway.

You don't mention any of this to him, though, and instead you simply take the bottle he offers you with only a little bit of disdain and watch closely as he pulls another drag from his long-burnt cigarette before flicking it into the fire pit and drawing another one out from some unseen pocket in his jacket. You don't really speak much aside from the obligatory introductions, (you tell him your name is Demyx; he says his name is "Axel" and you wonder if that's really true or if he just lifted it from Guns N Roses,) but even though you're unusually quiet tonight you find you don't mind the odd company. He's even kind of nice to sit with as the two of you hide away from the other partiers on the far side of the fire. There's so many people around, you notice, and yet you feel isolated; nobody to really connect with.

Maybe he feels it, too.

You wind up going home with him. When you get to his little store-top apartment there is no attempt at getting you into bed – only old videogames like he promised, and you beat his ass several times in Mario Kart before he finally gets even in Smash Bros. You take to teaming up in a few of his other collection classics and eventually you can see the sky beginning to brighten as the sea reflects the oncoming dawn. Daylight is still a little ways off when you find yourself curled up against him on the floor in a mess of couch pillows and half-finished cans of soda. You wake up with your head pounding from too much booze and sugar, bright red hair cascading into your vision and thin, calloused fingers lazily stroking your scalp.

You don't see him again for a day or two. Mostly it's because you haven't worked up the courage to face him again, although you lump it in with your lack of desire to go partying with rowdy strangers. The bonfires are less fun without anyone you really know, after all.

Still, it gets lonely on the beach when town starts to loose its appeal from the daylight hours and you find yourself striding once more towards the shoreline in hopes of curing the sense of restlessness that you've been steadily overflowing with. The stars are golden lights, so very far away from you across the water, and as you walk ever further away from the bonfire you can see a figure lying off near the rocks ahead. It's Axel, you realize when you get just a little closer.

He's sprawled on a blanket, staring up at the stars, though it's hard to tell if he's actually awake of just passed out drunk because he isn't moving. He doesn't even turn his head as you approach.

"Hey there," he greets; voice a whisper as you move to sit down. Ah. So he _is_ awake after all. You aren't sure what to think about that just yet – you haven't thought of anything to say. The two of you sit together in silence. In the dark, with the light of the bonfire well behind you and casting shallow shadows along the rocks, you can see that he's watching you from the corner of his eyes. There is a green glint as he catches you staring back and lifts his gaze to match your own. Still, you don't speak.

He shifts. Rolling onto his side he props a hand under his head to keep his stare level as he relaxes back into the sand. You simply look at him, waiting. At last he speaks, and when he does his voice is quiet, smoky, just like you remember it, and filled with a weird kind of melancholy that causes the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up. You're not used to people sounding like that around you – not used to people taking you seriously enough to talk to you like this. Like you're real and not just another effervescent smile in a head filled with straw. You don't know how to feel.

"You feel it too, don't you?" he asks. "Like you're constantly drowning." He tips his head to look back up at the stars but keeps his body tilted towards you. He looks like he's been pulled in, like you're a magnet and he's the needle of a compass. You wonder briefly if he's meant to lead you in a better direction. Or maybe just off to a different shore.

"I can see it, you know. The way you keep everything at a distance. Your smile's too tight." He takes a swig from the bottle still resting in his other hand before holding it out for you to take. You do, but you don't drink – not just yet.

"…You're just like me," you whisper, and it's the most honest thing you can remember saying to him thus far.

He grins. "I wasn't sure at first, but yeah." Taking the bottle back from you when it becomes apparent you're not finishing it off, he knocks the rest of it back and sits up properly. The empty bottle joins the small pile of its fellows over to the side. Deftly, Axel pulls out two more. You accept one, and this time you do take a drink.

More silence stretches between the two of you, but it's warmer now. Almost like an understanding, and you realize that you no longer feel so awkward not knowing what to say – there's no pressure here, no demand for you to keep the conversation gong. Axel hasn't asked anything from you; doesn't seem to expect you to ask anything of him, either.

"How could you tell?" you ask him, turning your whole body to look at him fully. "No one ever sees me unless I'm laying it on thick."

To your surprise, he laughs. It is a deep sound, pulled from well within his chest as he tosses his fiery head back and grins. You've never heard his voice above a murmur – it's bizarre to hear something other than the smoky, hushed quiet that you've become so used to in the short amount of time you've interacted with him. He gives up on gravity and flops back onto the blanket with a long exhale. "Dude, Dem, I know a mask when I see one," he shrugs. "When all you see is a fuckin' sea of fakes every day you start to tune them out. It's when you actually see somebody _real_ that you start payin' attention again." He frowns – something that looks wrong but right, you think, like it's a natural occurrence that doesn't need to be there – and when he glances at you again the look of melancholy has returned. "I didn't realize just how _much_ I wasn't payin' attention until I saw you for the first time. …Took me forever to get up the nerve to talk to you…" He trails off, eyes going dark as he lets his eyelids drop against the tiny pinpricks of starlight overhead.

You're a little stunned. Just how many nights had he been watching you across the fire? Was he there the whole time and you just didn't notice him? You wrack your brain to see if there's anything there but he shakes his head before you can get very far, as if he's been reading your thoughts as they wash across your face.

"I work in the hookah store in town," he explains. "I see you out on the boardwalk sometimes when I'm on break. Usually I go up on the roof to smoke so I don't bother anyone, so it's not like I'm really all that visible."

"Oh." You flush slightly, feeling a little bad for barely noticing him before – not that you paid much attention to the smoke shop, seeing as you didn't smoke at all. Still, the fact that Axel saw you much earlier than you ever saw him makes you feel a little sad. Like you were somehow robbed of a few more days of his company. You shake it off after a moment when you notice he's watching you again. Subtly, but he is.

You don't say anything else and neither does he. The stars continue to twinkle as the two of you sit in silence – there is nothing more to be said.

In the morning he is gone and you're left alone on the blanket with his jacket draped over the top of you. There's a note stuck into your pocket, written on the torn-off back of Axel's paper cigarette box. It isn't long, just a few quick words saying he had to work and that you "sleep like the friggen' dead" but it's still something, still more than you would have expected from anyone else. Not that anything happened between the two of you other than the shortest, most surprisingly real conversation in the history of ever. There's another ripped piece of cardboard folded in with the first, you notice – the front of a match booklet with the name of the hookah shop back in town. "2:00" is written just under the thick black of the shop's symbol, along with the word, "roof." You smile to yourself for the first time in ages and smile harder when you realize it's genuine. For a moment you feel happy, as boundless as the ocean and as far away from your hollow mask as the stars are from the sand.

Slipping on his jacket, you wad the dusty blanket up and tuck it under your arm. You face the long stretch of beach leading back up to town and find that the smile still hasn't quite left just yet. Maybe it will last until you can meet up with him for his break and you can show him the cracks he's left in your façade. The water shines orange with the low-hanging, newly risen sun – the reflected light still swimming behind your vision as you slowly make your way back to a now slightly less suffocating pocket of society.


End file.
